Considerable interest exists in methods for recovering gold from gold-bearing materials. Besides the obvious economic incentives associated with gold being a precious metal, environmental motivations justify extracting gold from certain gold-bearing waste materials (for example, consumer electronics).
A common method for gold recovery uses a cyanide leaching process in which highly poisonous inorganic cyanides convert gold(0) into a water-soluble Au(CN)2-coordination complex, which is subsequently isolated using cementation, absorption, or solvent extraction as typical methods. The cyanide leaching process for gold recovery is undesirable, as accidental leakages of cyanide result in environmental contamination and inadvertent cyanide exposure to those who conduct the process causes needless human health concerns. Accordingly, developing processes for gold recovery using environmentally benign chemistry is not only important from a green chemistry perspective, but such efforts may also lead to health benefits for the processing workers.